The Very Rich Hours

Two novels about money without morals.

In his 1844 manuscripts, Karl Marx writes about money as an agent of inversion. Once I have money, Marx says, I am no longer bound by my individuality: “I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. I, in my character and as an individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and therefore so is its possessor.” In tone and rhythm, this is a cynical visiting of St. Paul’s invocation of charity in I Corinthians, with money substituted for charity (a rewriting performed by George Orwell in his money-ridden novel “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”), and it culminates in Marx’s most comprehensive reversal: “If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of divorce?”

Trapped in the implacable cash nexus of the recent recession, we have all had time to reflect on money’s demonic brilliance, watching it pose as the bond of all bonds while it has really acted as the universal agent of divorce. (To be an investor in Bernard Madoff’s exclusive and supposedly “familial” fund was to be, in effect, an ignorant child of secretly estranged parents.) Two new novels deal intelligently with the implications of the recent crisis, and are especially acute about the moral alienation of greed, and about how hungry amoralists might use and abuse the idea of the family in order to nourish their ruthlessness. Jonathan Dee’s “The Privileges” (Random House; $25) concerns itself with a golden couple, Adam and Cynthia Morey, who profit from insider trading and then establish one of New York’s leading charitable foundations, thus effectively laundering their illicit gains; Adam Haslett’s first novel, “Union Atlantic” (Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday; $26), is partly about a banker, Doug Fanning, whose appetitive overreaching brings his bank, and the financial system, to near-collapse. He is prosecuted, but slips bail and flees to the Middle East. In both novels, the protagonists are more or less successful amnesiacs. They have severed ties with their sloppy or otherwise embarrassing parents, and have no need of superfluous emotional encumbrances: they march into illegality with efficient supply lines. They see money in the avaricious way that Madame Merle, in “The Portrait of a Lady,” sees friendship: “When a friendship ceases to grow,” she thinks, “it immediately begins to decline.” Adam Morey (the name suggesting both “money” and “more” of it) finds it “unsettling to think of money in terms other than those of growth, of how it might be used to make more money. Something about it smelled of death to him but he didn’t know why.” Neither he nor Doug Fanning seems very interested in what money can buy. They get involved in shady deals because the logic of perpetual growth pushes them beyond propriety, and because they enjoy the superiority that accompanies secrecy: “More than the money, which had to be spent with some care, it was about exercising that ability to repurpose information those around him were too timid or shortsighted to know what to do with,” Adam thinks. “That was what kept the whole scheme fresh at this point, that was its engine and its reward: the sense of living in two realms at once, one that was visible to others and one that was not.”

“The Privileges” is a clever, taut, cynically angry book about a couple with no moral tether. The Moreys care about their children, and about each other; their son describes their love as “epic.” Aside from that, everyone can be used. Dee is admirably relentless. There is a minimum of authorial omniscience—hardly a moment in the novel is not narrated from the perspective of Adam or Cynthia or one of their two children, April and Jonas. Most contemporary realist novels employ this kind of limited point of view, but most contemporary novelists quite like their characters. Not Dee. Since Adam, Cynthia, and April are astoundingly selfish and limited people, the book feels appropriately constricted, colored as it is by the evil banality it depicts. Money contaminates the very language of the narrative. Cynthia, for instance, finds it hard to stay in one Manhattan apartment for very long. Her husband understands: “He got why she didn’t mind packing up again, why there was such romance in the new, why it was so hard to stay in a place that had maxed out its own potential.”

This kind of ventriloquism allows for savage satire, because the book is effectively one long skein of unreliable narration; the reader is forced to pick a desolate path through a wilderness that thinks itself a garden. Dee seems to sympathize with his characters, but at every moment is subtly undermining them, a shifty kind of writing familiar to anyone who has read Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair.” For comparison, here is a man looking at his wife, in Richard Powers’s earnest and unironic novel “The Echo Maker”: “He held back a lock of her mocha hair and grazed her forehead. Her hair was thinner than it had been in college, when they’d met. How searchingly beautiful she’d been. But lovelier to him now, at peace with herself at last. Lovelier, because graying.” And here is how Dee does it, as Adam, now aged forty, regards Cynthia: “She looked older than she used to, that was true, and the unfairness of that made him a little sad.” That’s all; nothing more. It might seem, at first, that both novelists are indulging in a bit of sentimental relaxation. Why shouldn’t poor Adam get a bit sad? It is sad to get older. But, by this point in the novel, Dee has taught us how to negotiate his ironies, and that single noun, “unfairness,” with its tinge of self-pity, its metaphysical absurdity (how can it be “unfair” to age?), and the scream of its context (Adam is himself a stranger to fairness), is the little knot that ties together the whole sentence.

This, after all, is the Adam Morey who, after graduation from college, spends four years at Morgan Stanley, and then moves to Perini Capital, a private equity fund, “an outfit with a shitload of money behind it but so few people working there that Adam knew everyone’s name by the end of his first day”:

The money, pre-bonus at least, was actually a little less than he’d been making at Morgan, but it wasn’t about that. It was about potential upside, and also about his vision of what a man’s work should be: a tight group of friends pushing themselves to make one another rich. . . . The job’s only drawback was that it required some travel—the occasional overnight to Iowa City or the equivalent, to sound out some handful of guys who thought their business deserved to be bigger than it was. And strippers: for some reason these aspirants always had the idea that strippers were the lingua franca of serious money men. In truth Adam considered few things in life a grimmer bore than an evening at Podunk’s finest strip club, but he went along with it, because his job was to make these people admire him, a job at which he excelled.And here, twenty-five pages later, is Adam in Podunk—stuck with nothing to do in a Milwaukee hotel:

Back at the hotel Adam tried to book a flight home that same night, but there was nothing—some kind of storm was coming in, and flights were being canceled in bunches. A hotel room these days was basically like a mausoleum with a big TV in it; he couldn’t just sit there. But the health club in the basement was closed for renovations; and there was a Journey tribute band playing in the bar. It was like a nightmare. He hadn’t even brought any work with him.“It was like a nightmare.” There is nothing especially complex or delicate (sometimes not even especially subtle) about Dee’s use of this close third-person narration; the effectiveness is cumulative, and has to do with the novel’s shrewd balance of access and claustrophobia. The easy, contemporary flow of the writing carries us along so smoothly that we barely notice how alienated we ought to be from the characters’ preoccupations. At one point, Cynthia’s stepsister, Deborah, complains, “You’ve never not gotten anything you wanted. And now those kids of yours are growing up the same way. Like a little ruling class. . . . They have no idea how the other ninety-nine percent lives.” Cynthia then reflects:

It wasn’t the first time she’d reached the conclusion that, on the subject of children, most people were full of shit. What was supposed to be the point of denying them anything? Who decided that not having things that your parents hadn’t had either was character-building somehow? Narcissistic bullshit. Your children’s lives were supposed to be better than yours: that was the whole idea. And what was the point of getting hung up on how much things cost? You were expected to complain when things were, or seemed, more expensive than they should be: braces, for instance, which their dentist said both kids were eventually going to need. Fifteen grand, probably, before that was all over. But the fact was they could afford it. They spent sixty thousand dollars a year just to send their kids to school and they could afford that too.

Cynthia justifies herself by the myth of steady generational improvement. But Deborah’s point is that Cynthia’s children are already exactly like their selfish mother, so it is not clear how they could possibly live materially “better” lives than their wealthy parents. And Cynthia is deft at turning ethical questions into purely material ones: “how much things cost” is morally irrelevant to Deborah’s complaint. Anyway, Cynthia’s chilling conclusion runs, she can afford it all, so case closed.

The coldness of the novel’s narration is worth emphasizing, because there is some evidence that it will be softened by sentimental readers eager for characters they can “sympathize” with. The novel’s publisher calls this novel “an odyssey of a couple touched by fortune, changed by time, and guided above all else by their epic love for each other. . . . A timely meditation on wealth, family, and what it means to leave the world richer than you found it.” I fear that the reference to “epic” love here is devoid of Dee’s irony. The reviewer for Publishers Weekly mysteriously claims that “Adam and Cynthia’s nuanced personalities and playful, sincere exchanges form the novel’s empathic backbone.” But Dee’s narrative is about moral invertebrates, and is in fact shaped around a series of subtle suppressions. The book opens at Cynthia and Adam’s wedding. “Memory time!” the wedding photographer cries, yet both young people are keen to shuffle off their childhood memories. There is “nothing constructive about remembering,” Adam thinks, years later. Cynthia’s parents are divorced—her father has been loving but inconstant; her mother’s neediness irritates her. Adam’s father is a pipe fitter who became a union executive. “For a long time Adam had known his father mostly as a short-fused bastard, but then in his teenage years something had shifted, and he’d felt like both his parents were a little afraid of him. It wasn’t such a bad feeling, actually.” His parents are dispensable. At Perini Capital, several years after his marriage, Adam’s boss asks him about his father. “He’s dead” is the startling reply. He has died in the past year. It is the first we have heard about it, and the omission is telling.

The novel’s largest narrative suppression is structural, and nicely ambiguous. Despite a three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar bonus, Adam grows impatient at Perini; his wife, who has chosen to stay at home with the children, is clogged in low-level depression. At a party, Adam watches a Merrill Lynch broker named Devon engage in petty theft (he steals a watch), and almost whimsically decides to break the law, selecting this man as the chief partner in his insider-trading ring. He approaches Devon, and murmurs his proposal. “The Privileges” seems now bound to a conventional course, in which the rest of the story will chart the rise and fall of Adam’s perfidy. Sure enough, Adam prospers, and is then forced to shut down his operation. It looks as if the authorities are closing in. He goes home and confesses all to his wife. At which point, however, Dee cuts to a new section. It is several years later. Adam now runs his own hedge fund, and Cynthia is the head of their charitable foundation. They are admired and envied throughout Manhattan. Devon is in charge of “the fund’s nascent commercial-realty speculation arm,” which is Dee’s reticent way of hinting at the essential criminality of mortgage-backed derivatives. (The novel is set sometime before the current recession.) The decision not to answer the story’s natural question—will they or won’t they get away with it?—is of a piece with the novel’s commitment to ironic third-person partiality: Adam and Cynthia, who never thought they were doing anything wrong, have stainless consciences. Wrongdoing can just be forgotten. The novel ends without any suggestion of requital or real atonement; and, of course, nothing is more judgmental, in the end, than Dee’s avoidance of obvious judgment.

“The Privileges” is trenchant, but narrow. It knows exactly how to fill out its limits: well-chosen food on small plates. Adam Haslett’s first novel, “Union Atlantic,” is more ambitious, but clumsier, and often spills over its edges. Haslett is the author of a distinguished book of stories, “You Are Not a Stranger Here,” and he has confessed in an interview that this novel took several years to write, partly because “the long form intimidated me.” There are signs of that intimidation throughout, especially in the first half. At the level of structure and language, Dee’s book is hardly radical, but “Union Atlantic” is excessively conventional, and tends toward overexplanatory realism. The novel begins, for instance, with a prologue set in 1988, on the U.S. naval ship Vincennes, where Doug Fanning, then a young man, is one of the sailors responsible for the infamous shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet. The rest of the book takes place in Boston and New York in 2001 and 2002, but Doug’s old military connection, and his guilt, allow Haslett to keep the Iraq-war buildup in sight throughout the novel. This amplifies the fictional world, but at the cost of providing a slightly easy, cinematic backstory for Doug’s later moral weakness. Doug’s Vincennes episode fairly screams “fault line!”

Where Jonathan Dee is canny and parsimonious—that little touch about Devon now working in the “nascent” area of mortgage speculation—Haslett seems more obviously to have gone to the research well and brought back several full buckets. Major players are introduced with big splashes of authorial explanation, and the effect is more normative, less seditious than Dee’s cynicism. This is a character called Henry Graves:

As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Henry Graves had oversight responsibility for all the banks in his district, including Taconic. He also regulated the large bank holding companies that had come to dominate the industry. But the New York Fed, unlike the other regional Federal Reserve banks, was more than simply a supervisory institution. It was the operational hub of the whole Fed system. It acted as the Treasury’s agent in the market, buying and selling T-bills. Nearly every country in the world held some portion of their sovereign assets in accounts at the New York Fed. The wire service the bank ran cleared a trillion dollars in transactions each day. Simply put, Henry Graves was in charge of the biggest pumping station in the plumbing of global finance. His most vital function was to keep money moving. To do it quickly. And, above all, to do it quietly.

Likewise, characters tend to get access to their memories in traditional, “novelistic” ways. Doug builds a huge house in the town of Finden, Massachusetts, and moves in: “The first night he slept in Finden he remembered his dreams as he hadn’t in years. . . . He woke on his stomach, sweating. . . . He rolled onto his back and stared at the stilled ceiling fan, its rounded chrome fixture as spotless as the deck of the Vincennes on inspection day.” Two chapters later, some more dreams: “That morning he’d slept through his alarm, which he never did, caught up in dreams again, the remnants of which stuck with him as he cleared the town traffic and made it onto the Pike. . . . He’d dreamt of his cousin Michael and it had reminded him of when Michael had told him the story of Doug’s father.” We then get the story of Doug’s father. The next chapter opens with Henry Graves, in a hotel room, waking from a dream involving his sister: “Swallowing dryly, turning his head on the pillow, Henry half opened his eyes.” (Didn’t Haslett, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, notice that every other story in his workshops began with someone waking up?) Graves’s sister, Charlotte, is awarded an entire chapter of memory (she remembers her brief relationship with a man who died) which creaks into shape thus: “But even now as she tried to concentrate, to keep her mind here in the present, memory, like a troubled friend whispering through the screen, brought the image of her old apartment on West Eleventh Street.”

Ambition drives Doug to skirt banking rules and funnel enormous amounts of money, almost invisibly, to his trader in Hong Kong, a man named McTeague (in a hat-tip to an earlier American novelist about the hazards of wealth, Frank Norris). A hot streak turns cold; soon there are losses to be concealed. But at the center of “Union Atlantic” is a struggle between memory and amnesia. Doug, who has quit the Navy, and has moved to Boston to work for Union Atlantic, a commercial bank, decides to build his house in Finden, having chosen the property with triumphal care. He grew up in the poorer next-door town, Alden, and his mother cleaned the houses of people from Finden. She was also an alcoholic, and Doug has had no contact with her since he joined the Navy. “Noticing how the memory of her held him back, he decided he would no longer permit himself guilt.” His monstrously large house is an affront to the aged and eccentric Charlotte Graves, a former teacher who lives next door in a fine, ramshackle old place that her family has owned for decades. Convinced that the land Doug has built on is legally protected from such incursions, she files a lawsuit against the town for selling it to him.

On one side, then, there is the thrusting, semi-legal banker, with a murky, repressed past and a manic devotion to the American tabula rasa; on the other, the old Massachusetts blue blood, who wants everything to stay the same. As with the Vincennes prologue, this opposition seems a bit too helpful, since Charlotte Graves not only spends a great deal of time wandering down corridors of memory but is also an actual history teacher, the past both her pedestal and her former profession. Still, this guardian of the status quo is a vivid, thorny creation. Charlotte resembles Elizabeth, in Haslett’s moving story “The Volunteer,” an apparently eccentric woman who hears voices from the past. Charlotte thinks that her two dogs speak to her, one in the persona of Cotton Mather, the other in the persona of Malcolm X. Though potentially irritating, this oddity is managed by Haslett with a matter-of-factness that renders it nicely credible. And the opposition between Charlotte and Doug is properly complicated by the introduction of Charlotte’s younger brother, Henry, who is atavistically loyal to his sister, but who, as president of the New York Federal Reserve, and the grand vizier of zillions, is an accelerant of her obsolescence.

Haslett is a curious writer, who, despite the prizes and citations that were showered on his first book, still seems uncertain, and variable—often eloquent, but sometimes flowery, and sometimes workmanlike. He is timely, but a bit tweedy: “Union Atlantic” owes much more to, say, “Howards End” than it does to Don DeLillo’s money-infested “Cosmopolis.” Oddly enough, though, the weaknesses of his novel gradually become strengths. The sincere realism of the narrative, while somewhat stagey, allows him to move through many different social settings and classes: there are the posh Graves siblings; the lower-middle-class Fannings (we see Doug’s mother in a late scene); the relatively classless Jeffrey Holland, who runs the Union Atlantic bank, and who also lives in Finden; Nate Fuller, a gay teen-ager and floundering high-school student, who goes to Charlotte Graves for private tutoring in history, and begins an unexpected relationship with Doug; and Evelyn Jones, African-American, a high-level administrator at Union Atlantic, who travels to New York to report Doug Fanning to Henry Graves, and brings the tale to its finale.

Exactly as you would expect in such an ample, socially rich novel, the drawstring of the plotlines gradually tightens, and Doug Fanning, who had wished to escape all ties, past and present, finds himself the center of a cash nexus of his own making: harried by Charlotte, abandoned by Jeffrey Holland (who connives in his illegalities but in the end is happy to sacrifice him to the authorities), lustfully pursued by Nate, and turned in by Evelyn Jones. Doug’s huge, mostly unfurnished house, built on land once owned by the Graves family, is Haslett’s Forsterian symbol; as with much else in the book, the reader at first resists the sheer size of this thematic obviousness, and is gradually won over by it. “The Privileges” is the abler novel, but “Union Atlantic” is the more likable.

And, behind it all, money lurks—too pervasive to be a symbol of anything, yet always a symbol of everything; magical in its combination of the absolutely palpable and the intrinsically metaphorical; bond of all bonds and agent of divorce. In both books, rich people strive to turn the palpability of money into metaphor, much as they do in Henry James’s fiction. Pursuing acquisitions that are spectral and secretive (hidden, offshore accounts and the like), Adam Morey and Doug Fanning perhaps wish to repress the gross materiality of money; they get rid of it by rendering it unspeakable, illegal, almost imaginary; they push it under the table. But the repressed always returns. “Union Atlantic” has a powerful scene, near the end of the book, that takes place in the New York Federal Reserve, when Henry Graves shows Evelyn Jones the bank’s vaults filled with gold bars—“cages containing dark-yellow bars ten feet high and twenty deep. After a moment, she turned to look down the aisle, taking in the sheer number of separate compartments.” Graves remarks that visitors always want to look at the money, and then quotes John Kenneth Galbraith: “ ‘The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. A deeper mystery seems only decent.’ I suppose this is what’s left of the mystery.” ♦

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. His latest novel, “Upstate,” was published last year.